NAME

HTML::Formatter - Base class for HTML formatters

SYNOPSIS

  use HTML::FormatSomething;
  my $infile  = "whatever.html";
  my $outfile = "whatever.file";
  open OUT, ">$outfile"
   or die "Can't write-open $outfile: $!\nAborting";
  binmode(OUT);
  print OUT HTML::FormatSomething->format_file(
    $infile,
      'option1' => 'value1',
      'option2' => 'value2',
      ...
  );
  close(OUT);

DESCRIPTION

HTML::Formatter is a base class for classes that take HTML and format it to some output format. When you take an object of such a base class and call $formatter->format( $tree ) with an HTML::TreeBuilder (or HTML::Element) object, they return the

HTML formatters are able to format a HTML syntax tree into various printable formats. Different formatters produce output for different output media. Common for all formatters are that they will return the formatted output when the format() method is called. The format() method takes a HTML::Element object (usually the HTML::TreeBuilder root object) as parameter.

Here are the four main methods that this class provides:

SomeClass->format_file( $filename, option1 => value1, option2 => value2, ... )

This returns a string consisting of the result of using the given class to format the given HTML file according to the given (optional) options. Internally it calls SomeClass->new( ... )->format( ... ) on a new HTML::TreeBuilder object based on the given HTML file.

SomeClass->format_string( $html_source, option1 => value1, option2 => value2, ... )

This returns a string consisting of the result of using the given class to format the given HTML source according to the given (optional) options. Internally it calls SomeClass->new( ... )->format( ... ) on a new HTML::TreeBuilder object based on the given source.

$formatter = SomeClass->new( option1 => value1, option2 => value2, ... )

This creates a new formatter object with the given options.

$render_string = $formatter->format( $html_tree_object )

This renders the given HTML object accerting to the options set for $formatter.

After you've used a particular formatter object to format a particular HTML tree object, you probably should not use either again.

SEE ALSO

HTML::FormatText, HTML::FormatPS, HTML::FormatRTF

HTML::TreeBuilder, HTML::Element, HTML::Tree

COPYRIGHT

Copyright (c) 1995-2002 Gisle Aas, and 2002- Sean M. Burke. All rights reserved.

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

AUTHOR

Current maintainer: Sean M. Burke <sburke@cpan.org>

Original author: Gisle Aas <gisle@aas.no>